Jennifer Selway

Assistant Editor of the Daily Express

Valentine's Day is for smug marrieds

THIS week I speak of lurve. It cannot have escaped your notice that we are in the run-up to Valentine's Day with restaurants fully booked and the shops awash with pink corsetry, chocolates, cushions and all things deemed conducive to passion.

The old fashioned anonymous Valentine's card is a thing of the past [GETTY]

It's a very comfy sort of passion. It's all about what Bridget Jones would call "smug marrieds" having a cuddly "special night" with a bottle of rosé and giving each other his and hers sexy bed socks and scented candles.

And though it's a useful marketing device for all things heart-shaped doesn't it slightly miss the point?

What happened to the old-fashioned anonymous Valentine's card which - let's be honest - is a rather more exciting proposition than the one you get with your morning tea from your other half (signed "Me") or the one made at nursery school by your children (sweet as that is).

It's a good few years since I received an unsigned card from an unknown admirer (merely a prankster I dare say) and it didn't half make my day.

But in the age of telling all on Twitter or endlessly updating your "status" on Facebook the romantic idea of unspoken secret desire is almost unthinkable.

Yet surely there should be an element of anxiety and secrecy involved in a proper Valentine? Love is thrilling but for some it's the uncertainty that is addictive

Yet surely there should be an element of anxiety and secrecy involved in a proper Valentine? Love is thrilling but for some it's the uncertainty that is addictive.

That's the message in a new play which has just opened at London's Royal Court Theatre called The Mistress Contract by Abi Morgan (who wrote the film The Iron Lady).

It's based on a true story that emerged last year about an American couple (never named but called He and She) who originally met in the 1950s as students.

In the late 1970s after they'd had children and marriages they started an affair but he was a rich businessman and she was a hardup divorcée and she suggested that in return for the full menu of sexual services she supplied he should buy her a house.

They drew up a written contract and have observed it ever since, taping their conversations about their unorthodox arrangement which have been published as a book.

The book is now the play and will no doubt be turned into a Hollywood film starring (almost certainly) Meryl Streep.

Related articles

HE IS now in his 90s and the woman in her 80s. He has split from his wife yet he and his mistress continue to live in separate houses and the game they have played all these years with its built-in frisson of uncertainty LIZ has kept their relationship zingy.

It's a story about sex and the over-60s, about what women and men want from a relationship. It's also about a word that curiously is never mentioned in the entire course of the play. It's about love.